Since she started as the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art’s lead curator in July, Julia Jessen has been exploring their 8,000-piece permanent collection, scouring shelves, drawers and boxes in preparation for her debut exhibition, “Surprise!”
Little Village caught up with Jessen to see what’s catching her eye.
Tell me a little bit about your background. You’ve had quite varied experiences in museums, right?
Yeah, I’ve had a lot of different roles within the museum sphere. After undergrad I worked for a few years in what was then the University of Iowa Museum of Art in their education department. And that was a time when they still didn’t have their permanent building, so we were doing a lot of outreach and going out into schools, which was really fun.
I went to Syracuse for grad school and got a Master’s in Art History and a Master’s in Museum Studies, and [had] some internships and things like that during that time. I went to the Museum of Danish America over in Elk Horn, Iowa; I was the registrar over there.
This is my first time being an interior curator position, professionally.
What excites you most about this role?
Working in an art museum, with artwork, that’s something I always had in mind, and CRMA has such a fantastic collection here — both with the artists that you know and expect from CRMA, like [Grant] Wood and Marvin Cone, and then there are all of these surprises, which is the topic of this exhibition that I’m working on.
I’m hoping to pull out and show the breadth and depth of the collection, that maybe even people who have been here for a really long time might not know about. I think there are still surprises I can share, even with people who have been here many, many times before.
What are some examples of the surprises you found behind the scenes?
One of the things that I was surprised about was the strength of the ceramic and three-dimensional art in the collection. The museum actually has a really great partnership with the Iowa Ceramics Center and Glass Studio here in Cedar Rapids; we acquire work from the residents over there.
I was really excited to come across a small blackware pot by Maria Martinez, a very famous Pueblo potter. Cat Chow was an artist in residency in Cedar Rapids in 2006, and during the time she was here, she created this form made up of found material and material that community members brought in. It forms a round shape that has these rings [that] recalls a cross section of a tree — kind of marking the passage of her time here, but also teasing out some environmental issues as well.
I have a lot of options that I can work with, and now I want to kind of pare things down a little bit. It definitely is going to be an eclectic exhibition, I will say that.
Are there any pieces that haven’t seen the light of day, or at least any patrons, in a while?
There is a little photo album that I’m thinking of including and probably will, and it’s all Polaroid photos by Andy Warhol. It’s one of his little red books from 1971. He was, like, documenting the activities of his social scene using a Polaroid camera, and then he would sequence them in these little albums. It’s a piece that I don’t believe we’ve ever displayed before.
What are some other exhibitions coming up this fall?
We’ve got an artist’s exhibition with “Adam Rake: World Lines” showing some of [the Iowa City artist’s] work, which I think will be really interesting. He does a lot of thinking about how the meaning of artwork changes over time with advancements in technology and changes in society, and he works the canon of art history into his work, but kind of reinterprets them through his own lens.
The African American Museum of Iowa did a call for submissions of work from African-American artists in Iowa completed after 2000. The work, I think, is really strong, really powerful and a great exhibition, and one that we’re excited to have here. Then we have an exhibition that’s all about color coming up in November, “Roy G. Biv: A Rainbow of Art,” that is also drawn from the permanent collection like “Surprise!”, and that really celebrates the use of color by artists … whether it’s to evoke an emotional response or used in a more technical way for harmony or to lead you through a work of art. That should be another fun exhibition.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s September 2023 issue.
